Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

Since yesterday every time I change a power profile in the Power Manager the screen brightness is set to the lowest setting. This also happens upon bootup when the Power Monitor (the battery gauge on the taskbar) is loaded. If you look closer when changing the profile, you can see that the brightness is changed correctly but it's only a flash and then it goes down to 0.

However, if I unplug/plug the AC cable, the brightness change as expected.

ThinkPad as in sig., Vista Ultimate.

Any ideas for the cause of this?

I'm still experiencing this.

It seems to be caused by the power monitor (the battery gauge on the taskbar) or rather by a conflict between the monitor and something else.

I've found out that the power monitor is started by the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"PWMTRV"="rundll32 \"C:\\Program Files\\ThinkPad\\Utilities\\PWMTR32V.DLL\",PwrMgrBkGndMonitor"

If I remove this and start it by hand after the system is up, everything works as expected.

So far I've got it working by adding a rule to the Windows task scheduler. It starts the monitor 1 minute after the user login.

I'm still not 100% comfortable with this as there is something wrong with my system.

I was not able to find the cause of the conflict. Disabling other programs started during the bootup seem to fix this but enabling a number of them (doesn't matter which ones) make it come back.

I guess there is a simple answer to this - Vista. Some more of this and I might go back to XP at least until Windows 7 arrives.

We have a similar problem with a pair of X61s Thinkpads at work (mine is one of them!). Occassionally after booting the unit off of the dock (when the unit was previously only the dock) the brightness will be at the minimum setting. The on-screen controls (hotkeys) report it should be at the max settings, however. So something is not right. Normally you can drop the setting down one notch, then bring it up one notch (again) and the brightness will be on MAX again. Very odd. I've been meaning to clal Lenovo about this. This issue has been intermittent since we got the computers this past summer (we've been through a few ThinkVantage and driver updates since then).

We also have an issue when the 2nd X61s intermittently won't connect automatically to secure wireless (use use user certificates and 802.1x at work). However, you can manually connect. Again, this seems to occur predominately during the first cold boot after the unit was previous on the ultrabase. It generally connects automatically on the 2nd and 3rd boots, though not always. This is more prevalent for us than the screen issue. I'm thinking the two may be related. Though more and more I'm blaming an incomplete Access Connections uninstall on the 2nd unit (we use Intel PROSet/Wireless as our wireless client).

Prior to that, we had some issues with Bluetooth mice not automatically connecting at startup. Lenovo's suggestion then was to uninstall the Power Management drive (leave the power management app alone), uninstall the hotkey drive, then uninstall the bluetooth driver, and finally manually reboot. Then following the technician's guidelines, install the power management driver (leave power manager alone), install hotkey driver, then install the bluetooth driver, and finally manually reboot. Then select "Start Using Bluetooth."

For some reason I have a strange feeling that we need to get on a update merry-go-round again. Maybe it will iron out some of the issues? It sounds like we may be having similar issues with the screen brightness?

We're running Windows XP Professional x86 with Service Pack 3. Oddly enough, the Lenovo technician tried to tell me that the drivers aren't officially certified for SP3 (he suggested reverting to SP2 for Windows XP or going back to Windows Vista and SP1). I haven't tried Windows Vista on these machines (they did come with Windows Vista Business x86 from the factory, and I reformatted them with the Windows XP media from Lenovo.). We were using Power Management driver 1.42 and now we are using 1.44. We have been using hotkey driver 2.08.2008. I don't recall the version we had before that one. We've not using Access Connections. Right now the only ThinkVantage Apps we're using are Power Manager and Presentation Director. We're willing to dump Power Manager, though we'd like to keep Presentation Director, if possible. I believe the units initially shipped with Access Connections 4.52, which we later uninstalled.

Let me know, Yak.

-Aaron

Aroc wrote:We're running Windows XP Professional x86 with Service Pack 3. Oddly enough, the Lenovo technician tried to tell me that the drivers aren't officially certified for SP3 (he suggested reverting to SP2 for Windows XP or going back to Windows Vista and SP1).

I was experiencing the same issue with the display brightness as described in these two posts. After a lot of time spent troubleshooting I contacted Lenovo support, they told me the same thing (I was running XP Pro SP3). In my case the problem cropped up about a week after upgrading to SP3 so I did not connect the two. I wiped the drive and did a clean install of XP Pro SP2 - problem solved.

Since my system went through a couple of updates, I decided to check the issue again and enabled the startup of Power Manager through the registry again. This was a couple of days ago and the issue seems to be gone.

I still don't know what caused it but at least it works now.